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How the hell did Heathcliff get here?
It’s not a question he’s particularly asked himself a lot of times in his life, but the thought crosses his mind as he stares at his reflection in the mirror of Ryōshū’s bathroom, her coat with the same red-and-white as his uniform draped over his shoulders like a barber’s cape. He dares not move as Ryōshū’s hand reaches around him to select one of the instruments laid out on the marble sinktop.
“Don’t use the brush, just use the comb,” Heathcliff says, unable to hold himself back from speaking when her fingers wrap around the handle of a many-bristled brush. There’s a hint of urgency in his tone. “And just the wide tooth one, the thinner one’s not gonna work. And just — start from the bottom-up, so you don’t-“
“Shht.” Ryōshū hisses, grabbing his shoulder and silencing him. He glares at her in the mirror’s reflection, jaw clamping shut in obedience as she sets everything down and runs her fingers through his hair. It’s coarse and thick, much like her own, but curls and waves from the root before straightening out into long chunks, almost unnaturally. “Straightened?”
“What?”
“You straighten your hair,” Ryōshū says, pulling his bangs behind his ears and watching them cling to his jawline. She lets go and it falls forwards, bouncing up slightly as it’s released.
“…I do,” Heathcliff says.
The conversation ends there.
Heathcliff places his hands in his lap. Ryōshū picks up a wide-toothed comb, and upon catching Heathcliff eyeing her uneasily with it, rolls her eyes and gives it to him to inspect. He feels the material with his fingertips, sturdy and lightly patterned, and thankfully not plastic.
“Bone,” she explains briefly, and Heathcliff hands it back to her.
She begins to comb out his hair, starting from the bottom as requested, holding segments tightly within her fist as she teases out the knots. She’s surprisingly gentle with it — at no point does Heathcliff’s head suddenly yank back with pain as someone forces a brush through it. Her fingertips are long and slender as they ghost through his hair and section it out; he can hardly feel her touch at times, and as she continues to brush the knots and tangles away gently, he feels a yawn crawling out of his throat that he barely manages to suppress. Time draws out and slows to a crawl, the only thing keeping him attuned to his senses being the pleasant sensation of air against his oily scalp as she works her way up and scrapes the comb against it. His yawn escapes as a slow exhale, and she’s onto the next part.
The silence is awkward and heavy in the air. Heathcliff clears his throat in an attempt to break it, but Ryōshū doesn’t seem to notice.
“Me ‘n’ Quixote, we get up in the mornin’ and do each other’s hair sometimes. It’s… funny, sorta. She’s got the same hair as I do. You know, now that she’s healthier, her hair’s got that shine to it? Looks dastardly like a Bloodfiend now. Spooked the right rain out of me on more than a couple occasions."
Ryōshū hums to acknowledge his statement, and goes right back to brushing out his hair.
Heathcliff sighs.
“Nelly used to cut my hair,” he blurts out. She finally meets his eyes in the mirror. “It was the only time we had a moment to ourselves.”
“Hoh? Nelly?” she asks. Her eyes seem to flicker with something akin to recognition; he’s not sure if it’s addressed to him, or the name she’s just uttered.
“Oh, you know. My… caretaker.”
Ryōshū furrows her brows as she (finally) takes the cigarette out of her mouth, leaning too close into his hair for comfort. “Your father?”
“What? No. The Wuthering Heights Butler, she welcomed us in and then… and then…” Heathcliff clears his throat. “You met her.”
“Did we,” she says, running the comb through his hair as a final pass. It goes through mostly smoothly, and she sets down the comb in favour of a peculiar looking pair of scissors that look closer to shears than they do to scissors.
“Yeah. You know, you said… actually you called her a dog on a leash.” Heathcliff lets out something between a laugh and a cough as he recalls the memory. “Well, I guess we all were.”
Ryōshū hesitates a beat after he finishes speaking, before once again letting out a noise somewhere between agreement and acknowledgement of his words. She takes a lock of his hair between two fingers — it’s smooth now, and straightens out as she pulls it down towards his cheek. Heathcliff turns his head to see better, but she rests her hand on the side of his head to keep him front on. He doesn’t say anything. “Here?” she asks.
Heathcliff stares at the point in which it’s held by his chin, her pale and slender fingers oddly contrasted against the tone of his cheek. He once more tilts his head slightly, and then back. Ryōshū waits patiently. “That’s a bit short.”
She hums and draws her fingers slightly lower, down by his chin — when Heathcliff doesn’t stop her from bringing the pair of scissors to his hair, she snips it off in one smooth stroke. It falls neatly to frame his face, rising up when the tension held is gone, and Heathcliff relaxes slightly into the seat. The conversation dies afterwards as she drags her fingers through his hair and, matching the length of the first one, cuts through again. The noise of hair passing between the blades becomes all that fills the air.
Ryōshū’s touch is somehow gentler with the pair of scissors than she is with the brush; after all of the knots have been undone and removed, she glides through Heathcliff’s hair with such delicate precision that it’s almost impossible to sense where she’s cutting. The repetitive motion soothes like a lullaby; her expression fails to alter from neutral concentration as she cuts through effortlessly, clumps of hair falling to the ground. Oddly enough, Heathcliff notes that, despite thinking of his hair as black his entire life, it looks a rather vibrant shade of brown when compared to the hair that falls over Ryōshū’s eyes, and wavy when compared to how straight that pitch-black hair is. The one thing they share in common is the thickness of their hair; nothing at all like the wispy blonde strands that threaten to break under the heat of his hair straightener some early mornings, at the time between his mind not letting him rest from the previous day, and Don Quixote’s equally waking her in the early hours.
Ryōshū never seems to wander as many Sinners do in the early mornings; the voices of the ghosts haunting the Corridor never include hers. Despite this, she senses the spectre of his gaze in the mirror and clicks her tongue at him — he allows his heavy eyelids to fall shut, intimidated by that piercing red that peers out from under blunt-cut bangs. Something about her movements become more dangerous once he can’t see them, the snip of scissors quiet yet audible when so close to his ears. Unsettling enough, he can hardly hear the quiet sounds of another presence, the soft breathing or shifting of clothes or even blinking in the silent, echoing bathroom. It might be why that when she speaks, Heathcliff feels particularly attacked.
“You’re not grooming yourself,” she says. “Why?”
Heathcliff doesn’t open his eyes. His shallow breathing is the only indication that he’s even awake at all.
After a moment’s silence, he speaks.
“I can’t find a reason to get myself out of bed in the morning,” he says quietly.
There’s not much else to say. The remainder of the sentence lingers in the air regardless. So why would I bother? Where would I find the effort?
“You have a reason,” Ryōshū says, and then, uncharacteristically, she opens her mouth to continue her thought aloud. “You have…”
“Yeah but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to keep living without her, now is it?” Heathcliff's skin crawls with something worse than the cold air, something more familiar and far more uncomfortable, crawling at him, accusing him of something he'd never admit to. Despite his aggravation, his eyes remain closed. “Just because I got a reason to keep going doesn’t mean getting out of bed ain’t any harder or keeping myself all dolled up for work is any easier knowing I’ve still got— I’ve still got her in my heart, I still need to see her, it’s not my fucking fault you all treat me like—” He grits his teeth as Ryōshū brings the scissors to his chin, pressed against his jawline. Hush, the motion indicates. Calm down.
“You lose your reason, but the world continues to spin. Your world has stopped, but life goes on.” Ryōshū glides her fingers through his hair absentmindedly. Heathcliff is trembling, hands tightly gripping her coat’s fabric laid over his chest. His eyes are wild and bloodshot. He’s trying not to cry. “Or do you let yourself succumb to your self loathing again, mutt?”
She should have slit his neck with those damn scissors if she wanted to hurt him any less. In anger, his downcast eyes meet hers in the reflection of the mirror. Her expression is distant; she doesn’t meet his eyes fully, but she softens around the corners, as if to apologise for her previous statement. And then, she says softly,
“…You’ve been strong for so long.”
before she looks away and goes back to cutting his hair.
The confrontation is over so quickly that Heathcliff is unsure of how to respond — to chase after her would be pointless, and to back down would be weakness.
Over the ringing in his ears, he can hardly replay the phrase again in his mind, and decides that he’s already vulnerable enough, neck bared and awaiting the next severing of strands of hair that dust the floor like dead spiders, strung tight like thread that threatens to snap at the slightest tug of his leash at any moment, and yet… yet nothing happens. Ryōshū doesn’t mention it again, and he’s left to bite back the words that he wishes he could confess to her if she extended the courtesy of a conversation.
Instead, Ryōshū hums.
There’s nothing left but the sound of her voice reverberating into the empty bathroom; it turns into a quiet song as she cleans up his bangs and the back of his head, the snip snip snip of scissors a slow percussive beat. She brushes off his frayed edges, the last strands of loose hair falling to the ground as she fixes him up. Gently, she tucks his hair behind his ear before tilting his head left and right, satisfied with her work. The haircut, overall, is unassuming. It’s still long. It’s still shaggy. It’s still, oddly enough, Heathcliff.
“…Thank you,” he says.
“N.P.”